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Displaying items by tag: St Anne's Cathedral

#TITANIC - Philip Hammond's Requiem for the Lost Souls of the Titanic will be staged at St Anne's Cathedral on the centenary of the tragedy, BBC News reports.

The Belfast composer has spent over three years working on the "haunting" music that will pay tribute to the more than 1,500 people who lost their lives when the TItanic sank in 1912.

His requiem uses phrases from variations of the 'Nearer My God to Thee' and takes influence from Irish folk songs from the 1792 Belfast Harp Festival.

Accompanying the music will be lyrics from the original Latin Requiem Mass sung by the Belfast Philharmonic Society, Anuna, the Schola Cantorum of St Peter's Cathedral, Belfast, and Cappella Caeciliana.

The cathedral itself will also be part of the story, with seating arranged to imitate that on a ill-fated ship.

"It is part of history and it is part of who we are," said Hammond of the Titanic story.

BBC News has more on the story HERE.

Published in Belfast Lough

About Brittany Ferries

In 1967 a farmer from Finistère in Brittany, Alexis Gourvennec, succeeded in bringing together a variety of organisations from the region to embark on an ambitious project: the aim was to open up the region, to improve its infrastructure and to enrich its people by turning to traditional partners such as Ireland and the UK. In 1972 BAI (Brittany-England-Ireland) was born.

The first cross-Channel link was inaugurated in January 1973, when a converted Israeli tank-carrier called Kerisnel left the port of Roscoff for Plymouth carrying trucks loaded with Breton vegetables such as cauliflowers and artichokes. The story, therefore, begins on 2 January 1973, 24 hours after Great Britain's entry into the Common Market (EEC).

From these humble beginnings however, Brittany Ferries as the company was re-named quickly opened up to passenger transport, then became a tour operator.

Today, Brittany Ferries has established itself as the national leader in French maritime transport: an atypical leader, under private ownership, still owned by a Breton agricultural cooperative.

Eighty five percent of the company’s passengers are British.

Key Brittany Ferries figures:

  • Turnover: €202.4 million (compared with €469m in 2019)
  • Investment in three new ships, Galicia plus two new vessels powered by cleaner LNG (liquefied natural gas) arriving in 2022 and 2023
  • Employment: 2,474 seafarers and shore staff (average high/low season)
  • Passengers: 752,102 in 2020 (compared with 2,498,354 in 2019)
  • Freight: 160,377 in 2020 (compared with 201,554 in 2019)
  • Twelve ships operating services that connect France, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Spain (non-Covid year) across 14 routes
  • Twelve ports in total: Bilbao, Santander, Portsmouth, Poole, Plymouth, Cork, Rosslare, Caen, Cherbourg, Le Havre, Saint-Malo, Roscoff
  • Tourism in Europe: 231,000 unique visitors, staying 2.6 million bed-nights in France in 2020 (compared with 857,000 unique visitors, staying 8,7 million bed-nights in 2019).